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RichardKennaway comments on Responses to questions on donating to 80k, GWWC, EAA and LYCS - Less Wrong
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Thanks for this.
Another question...
Did those involved with CEA study the literature on human value drift — if so, what did they find? What is CEA's own experience with it?
Examples I've witnessed several times each: Someone plans to do environmental law only but they end up in corporate law. Another person plans to become a professional philanthropist, but then fails to donate later, and instead spends money keeping up with the Joneses. Someone else plans to be a genuine, pleasant person but then they study "pickup artistry" and find that being a manipulative, cocky jerk actually does increase their success with women, and a bit later I discover they're a cocky, manipulative jerk to everyone. (Note to everyone: there are lots of ways to increase one's romantic success without becoming a cocky, manipulative jerk!)
I wish I knew how often this kind of value drift happens. Value drift with regard to professional philanthropy seems to happen a lot in the SI community; maybe it happens less often in communities focused on more "ground-level" causes like poverty reduction? What can be done to prevent it?
Of course, we probably don't want to prevent some kinds of value drift, e.g. value drift that occurs strictly due to encountering new and better information. I used to care a lot about God's will, until I gained information indicating God's non-existence.
Why do you think that does not describe the other examples you cited? Those examples are other people while this example is yourself. From inside change feels like finding the truth, while from outside it looks like value drift. What do those other people say about themselves? What do religious people you know say about you?
What you do changes who you are, and few young people's plans for their life are going to survive longer than a tiny fraction of it.
I don't know that that's the whole story.
For example, during the time I worked at Google, I observed that my coworkers' values, including those of people I otherwise respected, were drifting towards the values of the organization (or the value of loyalty toward the organization). This was part of the reason I left. I suspect this kind of value drift happens to most people in any organization or job. It's hard not to absorb the values you spend most of your time around, let alone the values that pay your salary.
So this is a case where I anticipated that my values were likely to drift, in a way incompatible with my current values, and removed myself from a situation I thought likely to cause that drift. (Mind you there were plenty of other reasons.)
Not to say that you weren't right to do that, but I notice that the religious will sometimes avoid consorting with the non-religious for the same reason.
Faced with an experience that one foresees being changed by, how should one decide whether to go ahead with it? Given several sets of values, such that from the standpoint of any of them all the others look worse, how to decide which to adopt?